


letters only hold so much

by mysteriousnight



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Episode: s07e26 The Party, F/M, Letters, M/M, Peg wants BJ to be happy, and she knows BJ loves Hawkeye even though he hasn't told her, this is mostly just Peg thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:36:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27584198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysteriousnight/pseuds/mysteriousnight
Summary: Peg didn't say any of that, she couldn't form the words around this idea that the unconditional loyalty and devotion her husband had had just for her was suddenly extended to another, or that she wasn't mad about it, not in the slightest. So instead she took a drink from her glass and looked at the liquid as she talked. "I think they're going to see each other again."At the party her husband and his friends had arranged for all their families to meet each other, Peg talks with Daniel Pierce about the letters they both receive home, all while thinking that maybe the letters are telling her more than just what the words say.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	letters only hold so much

**Author's Note:**

> hi, so, um, i started this show this year, and i sort of ended up watching the majority of it during october and so that ended up with me writing this on halloween. i'm finishing the show this week, so i guess i wanted to post this. anyways, i love peg hunnicutt, and all the characters of this show (except frank. he can choke)  
> live laugh love to the other people who are reading and writing mash fics in the year 2020 <3

The room was alive, music swinging through the air, dance floor packed with people partnered with people they didn't know not twelve hours earlier. Peg sat at one of the small tables positioned around the room, Erin in her lap, her daughter's fingers curling around the necklace she was wearing. She was content to sit there, watching as the other danced. This evening already brought her so much joy, and she could already anticipate how happy her husband would be when she wrote to him about it.

She turned her head and saw Mildred walking over, the woman already smiling her way. She stopped in front of Peg, her eyes shining down at her. "Do you mind if I take little Erin to dance?" Erin looked at the woman who said her name, reaching out to grab one of Mildred's hands. Peg laughed.

"I don't mind at all." She shifted, rising to her feet. Mildred accepted Erin in her arms with ease, the ease of a mother, whose arms had held a child countless times. Peg felt safe, handing her daughter over, as if she had known Mildred for her whole life. She trusted her implicitly, in a way she had never felt before, like she would gladly put her life in the hands of this woman. It was strange, but Peg accepted strange, understood not everything she felt could be put into neat, logical words.

She watched them walk away, joining the crowd on the dance floor, her daughter already mouthing a rush of childhood babble to the old woman. Peg hesitated, unsure if she should just sit down again, now alone at the table. She didn't want to dance, not now, not when she was thinking too much. 

Her eyes caught on Daniel Pierce, the man sitting across the room, his own table empty save for him. She didn't have a chance to talk to him yet, at least not alone, other conversations kept her busy, distracting her from talking to him, from holding a conversation she was anticipating, the conversation she was wanting to have. 

As she walked over there, she could almost picture her husband's face, how it would light up to know she had met Daniel, talked with him, got along with him. Though he never wrote it, Peg could sense his nervousness for her to meet these people, the fear they would not get along, and there was no one he wanted her to meet more than the father of Hawkeye, the father of the man he spent almost all his waking hours with, the father of the man he wrote about constantly.

"May I sit?" Peg asked when she reached the table, one hand placed delicately on the back of the chair beside him. Daniel looked up at her and nodded.

She was quiet for a few moments, her own nerves getting the better of her. She set down her drink she had brought with her on the table, hands smoothing down her dress before picking up the glass again: hands busy, mind busy, racing with thoughts. BJ wanted her to get along with this man, yes, but she had something she wanted to say to him too, something she thought she could only say to him, the thought creeping in her mind. She blinked, smiled, looking at the man sitting beside her with a thoughtful gaze.

"You know, sometimes BJ's letters are more about your son than himself!" Peg said, trying, hoping it came out like a joke, like this thought hadn't been crushing her for weeks, months. Like this conversation starter hasn't been on her mind ever since this party was planned.

"I feel the same way sometimes. Ben always seems to want to tell me how your husband is doing before he tells me about himself."

Peg smiled, nodded along lightly, but she couldn't help to notice the difference in the wording. He only felt like it, this thought just a passing humor in this moment, said more in attempts to try to make conversation with this woman he just met than an actual inspection of the letters. Peg  _ knew  _ it was true, counted the sentences in the last one. 89 of them about Hawkeye Pierce, 89 out of 105 sentences. She felt crazy doing it, taking the letter, laying it down on the table, and going through it with determination, or maybe jealousy, or maybe desperation (desperation for what? To know her husband was happy? That she wasn't going crazy?). 

Daniel's laugh brought her out of her melancholy, and she tried to see what he was laughing at, but for the life of her, she couldn't. She stopped trying to look for it, and instead looked at Daniel, as if his face could give her any knowledge of his offspring, of the man her husband was with right this very second. Of the man her husband talked about with a fondness she was scared of.

"How are you holding up?" She asked, couldn't think of a better thing to ask. Maybe she asked so he would ask it to her in return, and then she could tell someone she was holding on by a thread, and with each letter she received from her husband, that thread was growing thinner. She wouldn't say that, she didn’t even say it to her husband.

"It's been hard, knowing Ben is over there." Daniel's aged face looked at her with an expression she couldn't begin to discern. "But knowing he has such a good friend as your husband there with him makes it all a little better."

Peg wanted to laugh, bit down on her tongue to keep herself from laughing. It wasn't funny, not in the slightest, but the laughter was a reaction to the obtuse feeling of relief that filled her. It didn't make things better, her jealousy still digging it's way into every bone, but at this point it might not be jealousy anymore. It started out as jealousy, the itching at the back of her skull to read into the unspoken things in those letters, but somewhere along the way it turned into worry. Not worry for her marriage; she never really had to worry about that because in all honesty, at this point being married to BJ or being divorced from BJ would be the same thing. He was her best friend, and she knew she was his, maybe not to the same extent, not anymore, not after Hawkeye, but things would still be okay between them even if they got a divorce or BJ came home from the war loving someone else. So the jealousy wasn’t jealousy, and the worry wasn't about her marriage, but it was about how her husband was doing, how her _ best friend _ was doing. And maybe she was counting the sentences in his letters to calm her worry more than doing it because of anything else, thinking that if her husband was writing more about his friend than himself then nothing could be wrong, that he was fine, or as fine as he could be in a place like that. 

Listening to Daniel voice her thoughts, how good it was to know that her husband was not alone out there, it made Peg want to laugh, and cry, and hug Daniel. But she did none of that, because it wasn't the time, nor the place, and what she really wanted was to hug her husband, or maybe hug Hawkeye. 

"Do you think they're going to see each other after they come home?" Peg didn't know what she wanted to hear, didn't know she was going to even ask the question before it was out of her mouth. Did  _ she  _ want them to see each other after the war? Or did she want them to fade out of each other's lives instead, so she could have her husband back, so she could be the one to piece him together again after he comes home a broken man. 

Daniel leveled her a look, watching her, examining her face, as if he could find the answer she wanted to hear on her forehead, or in the tired lines of sleepless nights underneath her eyes. "I'm not sure. They live on opposite sides of the country."

_ BJ would drop everything to see him _ , Peg thought with such a deafening confidence her grip tightened on her glass. She didn't know where that thought came from, nor the confidence she had that it was true. The BJ before— before he got drafted, before he left, before he met Hawkeye, before he wrote home to her more about his friend than himself, before this stupid, pointless war— BJ would have never done that. 

He had friends, and he cared about those friends and they cared about him in turn. But if one of them moved across the country, BJ wouldn't have gone to visit them. They would exchange letters occasionally, even more occasionally talk on the phone, but those correspondences would have faded with time and distance, and soon that friend would be just another person to send a Christmas card to. But that wouldn't happen with Hawkeye. Peg was sure if it, more sure about it than knowing the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, or that her daughter's name was Erin, or that when her husband came home, he would be a changed man, for better or for worse. BJ would do anything to see Hawkeye again, let it be quitting his job or spending every weekend in airports or leaving California for good (leaving Peg for good?).

Peg didn't say any of that, she couldn't form the words around this idea that the unconditional loyalty and devotion her husband had had just for her was suddenly extended to another, or that she wasn't mad about it, not in the slightest. So instead she took a drink from her glass and looked at the liquid as she talked. "I think they're going to see each other again." The ice in her glass clicked at the sides as she realized her hand was shaking. She stilled it. "They lived with each other so for long, it would be hard suddenly never seeing that person again."

"War makes things hard," Daniel's voice was somber, remembering. "Sometimes the hardest thing to do after you get home is to see the guys you saw every day over there. It brings back memories, some good, some bad, most just muddled in melancholy and the blood of innocent young men."

They sat in silence for a while, the insides of Peg churning in fear. BJ tried not to talk about the war in his letters home, or the casualties, or the work he did over there. But Hawkeye probably did, his dad was a doctor after all, and telling him about sewing up teenager after teenager until everything was red and white and green and nothing was the same, especially not the 17 year old boy whose stomach was just torn apart by metal fragments— telling his dad about that was different than BJ telling his wife. 

Maybe that's why she was more hopeful for them meeting again after the war, after Korea was just a memory and they never had to see a pair of green pants again. Because her letters were filled with the aftermath, the moments between the surgeries and casualties and the destruction of war. Her letters are filled with laughter and jokes and paragraphs of what her husband did with Hawkeye that week. But she didn't know which letter told more of their future: if their memories of each other would reside in blood or in laughter; in the operating room as they stood over body after body, hour after hour, day after day, or in that tent they lovingly call The Swamp with that homemade still and all the moments they spent in there so insignificant to not write home about, but still quiet moments between the two of them nonetheless.

"I think BJ would do anything to see your son again." And there it was: the words she told herself she wouldn't say, each letter laced with vulnerability, knitted together by hope. She didn't know what she was saying, didn't know the true extent of what lay underneath her words, the unspoken words that not only brought her husband to the firing squad, but her marriage and her quiet home and her American Dream. 

But Daniel didn't seem phased by the words, or the depth the words went in revealing the unspoken things written in the letters they both receive home. He smiled, a calm and steady smile, like a ship bearing each wave and making through them all. "I know my son would do the same."

_ Do we know the same thing?  _ Peg couldn't ask that. She didn't  _ know  _ anything. What was written between the lines did not hold more weight than what was on the lines, the words that told her how much he missed her and how much he loved her. She would not do BJ the disservice of ignoring the words, thinking them untrue. She knew they were true, knew he loved her, but maybe the love wasn’t the same, or maybe it had always been like this and he had never met anyone who he felt a different kind of love for, a stronger kind of love, until he went off to Korea and met a man named after a characters in a book. 

Her husband loved her, and she still loved him, but maybe it was time to reassess their love, see if it wasn't just friendship conflated to envelope romantic love, because by the jealousy she wasn't feeling, Peg wondered if she ever felt that romantic type of love in the first place.

"What about you, Peg? How are you doing?"

"Like you said: it's hard." Peg tried to smile, but stopped before it could turn sour. "He's over there, and I'm here. With our daughter." She looked out at Erin, where Mildred was dancing with her, smiles on both their faces. 

How would Erin handle being a child of divorce? Peg didn't want to think about it, but with each letter home, the thought was growing darker in her mind. BJ would stay with her if she asked him to, she knew her husband well enough to know his devotion to her did not stop at love. It ran deep, like he was meant to do nothing else but be devoted, to drop everything for her, to willingly put his own life on hold just so she could be happy. But she had the same devotion to him, the same undying need to help him be happy. 

She wouldn't ask him to stay, how selfish even the thought to consider it was, but she wasn't sure if she could tell him to go either. And really, that might be worse, might make things worse, if she couldn’t tell him that he could leave her if he wanted to, that he could be happy with that man he met in a foreign land, that he could love someone else. If she didn't tell him, then he might stay forever, keep himself tied to her through the legal written document of marriage. Of course he would visit Hawkeye, hop on a plane and travel across the country every month, or maybe every week, and the phone calls would be every day. But no matter how many times he would go and visit, or how many hours he spent on the phone with him, BJ would always come home: back to her and California and the false imitation of the life he had lived before the war. A life that would be making both of them miserable.

Peg sighed. She was tired, had been so for months, just a constant effort to be alright, for her daughter, for her parents, for her husband, for herself. But it had been growing hard to be alright, truly alright, when with each letter it felt like she was losing a grip on her husband, and in turn, losing a grip on herself. It was in the unknowing that she felt her husband slipping away, in the grey space, the implications that ran between the lines in his letters, words that were unspoken, stayed unspoken, would never be spoken. She just wanted to know plainly, in simple terms, if what she saw in the letters were true, or if she was just growing used to being apart and needed reassurance her husband was feeling the same thing, projecting on him her own need for him to be happy with someone else, as she was so happy with her independence. She wanted to ask him, send him a letter with a single sentence:  _ Do you love him? _ And then she'd know, there'd be no more guessing, no more analysis of what her husband wasn’t telling her.

He wouldn’t reply to that letter. He would act like it got lost in the mail and was never received. Even if she asked him directly, he wouldn't tell her; even if she got on the phone and demanded to speak to her husband right then and there and ask him in real time if he was in love with him, her husband would suddenly say he didn't hear her, or his phone was full of static and she needed to speak up. He would dodge as easily as she could ask, a dance they would play, running around each other even when they had an ocean separating them. 

"I want him to be happy," Peg said the words carelessly, like a thought she didn't mean to say out loud. Daniel blinked and stared at her, trying to find the meaning in her words. 

"When he comes home, I'm sure he's going to be ecstatic to see you."

That wasn't what she meant. When BJ came home, he would be bursting with joy. He would take her in his arms and hug her like he used to when he was getting home from a long shift at the hospital, a hug of relief and happiness of seeing her after being away. But she wasn't talking about that; she was talking about after that initial month, or week, or day, because before long he would start missing Hawkeye, and something inside Peg told her she would be helpless to that. 

She wasn’t sure she would make him happy, could make him happy like she used to, not the happiness that seemed everlasting, or happiness that was like absence of tension and with it all fears and other desires would disappear. He was different, she could tell he was different just by his letters, could track the changes in the way he wrote to her, the shift in focus. He always wrote about what made him happy, never dwelled on what made him sad, not in a letter to her, so he wrote about memories, and how something reminded him of home, or of her, or of Erin. And somewhere along the way, he stopped writing about that in his letters, focused instead on a joke Hawkeye told him, or the time he and Hawkeye took a walk down to a pond they were near that week and spent a casualty free day there together. He wrote her letters to dwell on his happiness, and that happiness was no longer tied solely to her and their life they made together, but it was happiness brought on by a single man. And more than anything, Peg wanted him to stay happy, to keep his happiness going, and if that meant he needed to go visit Hawkeye every week or he needed to leave her or he needed to move permanently across the country, then Peg wanted him to do it. She would help him do it in an instant, but she just didn’t know how to tell him so, to express her acceptance of him, or her own happiness at his happiness. 

Peg looked over at Daniel, at the father of the man who made her husband so goddamn happy, and she considered telling him her thoughts, telling him about how she thought their friendship might go deeper. How she thought her husband might divorce her when he came back home and she couldn’t for the life of her be sad at that. But she couldn't tell him, just as she couldn't ask her husband about it all. She would not spoil the image Daniel had of his son, an image Peg was certain did not include being in love with her husband. 

Instead she gave him a tired smile. "When they come home, I really cannot wait to meet your son." And that was the truth. She needed to meet this man her husband wrote so much about, the man who even in a war zone could make her husband happy.

"In his letters, Ben sometimes talks about you," Daniel paused a moment, shaking his head with a smile. "Well, he talks about your husband talking about you."

Peg blinked. "He does?"

It felt like the other shoe had dropped, the light finally dawning on the situation. Maybe BJ didn't know. Or, more accurately, maybe he didn't let himself think about it, dwell on the chance the love he thought he had for his wife was not the strongest love he felt. And so he talked about her, filled conversations talking about his world back home, with his daughter and wife: the two shining staples of a happy, fulfilled life. A life he shouldn't want to leave, a life that was so perfect it would be foolish to leave. He used her to deflect his feelings, smother the love with the letters she sent him, every time he spoke the words "my wife" was another nail on the coffin he was burying this new found love in.

Peg didn't know why she never thought about that before, the possibility her husband was scared about this love, afraid of what it meant for him, for them, for their life. And, yes, it would ruin everything, pick apart the life they had piece by piece until there was nothing left except two bodies separated now by the ruin that befell them. But Peg saw past that initial ruin, because beyond the ruin was another life for themselves, a life where marriage did not bind them together, but a friendship that was already there. She wasn't afraid of the ruin, because she knew where it would lead, the happiness from the future overpowering any sadness the destruction would entail.

But her husband has always been a practical man. Done things by the book, step by step, the big picture worthless if you didn't know the parts. And he got stuck on the parts, scrutinized each one and made sure it was perfect. He couldn't look past the ruin, not like Peg could. He couldn't shake the guilt that came with knowing if he let himself love, stopped trying to keep this love down, he would wreck the life he had back home. 

Oh, doctors: always trying to fix things even before they become broken.

Daniel looked at her, his eyes impossibly deep, kindness rolling off him in waves Peg could almost physically feel. If Hawkeye was even a fraction like his dad, Peg understood how it happened, how BJ got sucked into his orbit. Daniel had a presence that knocked Peg back and drew her in all at once. It was almost intoxicating, having this conversation, feeling a deep understanding with the man beside her, and a peace settling in her gut, a feeling of contentment that she hadn't had in a long time. Peg didn't think she could leave now even if she wanted to.

Daniel smiled again. "I remember Ben spent a whole letter telling a story your husband had told him about you. Something about trying to fix your fence, I believe."

Peg laughed, the reaction coming out easily, the memory of that story coming back to her, and how she wrote to her husband the following day, and how when he wrote back, he didn't even mention telling Hawkeye about it. Or about how he had told Hawkeye, and that the story had impacted Hawkeye so much, he just had to write home about it. And maybe there was something there, something Peg couldn't grasp right now. Something in the care it took for Hawkeye to do that, and the love that was behind the action, whether or not anyone involved knew it was love that was driving it. It took love to listen to a story, especially a boring story about her trying to fix a goddamn fence. And it took love to write it down again, a specific action to tell someone else the story: for a man to take a story about a woman he had never met and tell it to another person who had never met her. Why did Hawkeye do that; what was so important about that story he just had to retell it to his dad?

Peg racked her mind, but she couldn't find anything. The story wasn't all that interesting. Their fence broke, some local kid accidentally hitting it and knocking a few posts loose. And then it was her, trying to find the hammer and nails, trying to remember where BJ had put them. And that was it. Nothing exciting, barely anything to write about. But Hawkeye wrote home about it, wrote home about a boring story that wasn't even his. 

And suddenly Peg understood something, that maybe she was trying so hard to understand Hawkeye by trying to understand his father when she should have just looked at herself instead. Maybe he was a lot more like her than she thought because it was love that fueled the act, but preservation of happiness as well. He wrote about the story because it made BJ happy. That was why she wrote about it in the first place: because she knew it would put a smile on her husband's face to read about her spending three hours searching the house for a hammer and nails. And Hawkeye saw that happiness when BJ told him the story, and he wrote it down, not because he was dying to tell his dad about how a wife in California found a hammer, but because it made BJ happy, and so it made Hawkeye happy. 

And Peg understood that, probably better than anyone could understand another human being. She understood the desperate, almost painful need for those you love to be happy, and to sustain that happiness once it was there. Hawkeye wanted BJ to be happy, and she did too, and they were dancing around the same man, both able to do the things that would bring him happiness, but neither doing anything, both paralyzed with fear. Uncertainty? Regret? Or maybe just by circumstance: they were in the army after all. 

And she, well, she was an ocean away from her husband. She couldn't see him, couldn't hear him, couldn't watch him interact with Hawkeye. All she had was letters; all she could base her actions on were words on a page. And words could lie. They could twist and deceive and look so large when they really were hollow; the spaces between the words always so inviting to the imagination, allowing thoughts and desires and assumptions to run wild at all the words that weren't written.

Again, she couldn't do BJ the disservice of believing more in the unwritten than what was there in front of her. And, then again, maybe Hawkeye was the same: sitting there as her husband rambled on about his wife, about what she did today, or what she said to him, or about how much he loved her. How could she blame Hawkeye for not doing anything, when her husband was practically screaming at him that he was unavailable, that his love laid elsewhere. So they were both stuck, destined to sit idly by as her husband did everything to reveal nothing, to put on a face of calm and contentment, to remain so in love with her it hurt. Her hands were tied, her letters neat and prim and never containing the one scandalous question she so desperate wanted to ask. She loved her husband, felt for him so deeply that sometimes it did hurt to love him, but not in the same way it hurt him. His love was a defense, put in place to not let him hurt others, the love he felt for her neatly trapping the other emotions that boiled and raged up beneath the surface, the other love he was denying himself. But the pain she felt for loving him was tied up in the fact that she knew him, intimately, well enough to know what he was thinking, what he was taking care to hide from her even while it hurt him.

Peg looked at Daniel, reeling in her thoughts that had run away from her. She would do something later. Write to her husband about the love she was sure was there, put it in the middle of an unassuming letter, so the question would surprise him. And if he didn’t answer that one, she would send him another, the question lodged deep in that one too. And she would keep asking, because she could be persistent when she needed to be, and she could be patient when it seemed necessary. And patience was necessary for love; love might be built on patience. And maybe she would write Hawkeye, too. Send him a letter, asking how he was, telling him how her husband wrote about him, the intensity and passion in his words she never read elsewhere. And that might knock something loose, spark a reaction quicker than just writing her husband.

Peg smiled as a new song started to play, a saxophone dominating the room. She stood, resting her palms against the table. She felt okay, steady, a piece of her lodged back into place. "Do you want to dance?" She looked down at Daniel and turned one of her hands over, moving it towards him as an invitation. Dully, she thought of her husband, if he had ever offered his hand to Hawkeye, asking if the other Dr. Pierce would like to dance. The thought made her smile, something itching deep in her heart. She knew everything was going to be alright.


End file.
